The Investor Mandate Database
The key to successful alternative investor marketing is current and accurate prospect information. Targeting investors with relevant mandates yields much higher conversion and allocation rates than blind cold calling.
Yet the cost of having a marketing staff source, capture, and maintain investor contact and mandate information is high: 90 minutes a year per investor record. For a list of 500 contacts, that's almost 40% of a staff marketer's time.
This is why many fund managers subscribe to the BHA investor mandate database. Our 20-person research team:
- Keeps our database current by conducting one-on-one phone interviews with the investors who own the mandates for their firms or organizations.
- Collects investor requirements and preferences for fund manager type, strategy, sector, region, and other pertinent criteria.
- Compiles mandates and verifies them with investors before making this information accessible to clients.
This team updates more than 5,500 investor mandates every 90 days. It makes approximately 3,000 calls every week, resulting in 80 to 90 updated mandates and 30 to 40 new investor mandates. To grow the mandate database, BHA maintains a backend database of 35,000 global institutional and private investors. This database:
- Contains approximately 85% of the world's alternative investors; 40% of these investors are located in North America, 40% are in Europe, and 20% are spread throughout the rest of the world.
- Covers 15 categories of institutional and private investors.
The research team harvests names from this database and interviews these investors. It documents not only their contact information but also their investment requirements. These new records are then added to the investor mandate database.
Given the quality and quantity of investor prospects, many fund managers consider the mandate database their de facto source for market research.
Contact Management
The final component of the BHA Solution is a Web-based application that gives clients access to the BHA network. The contact management system lets clients fully manage and prioritize their marketing campaigns. BHA has built a proprietary Web application that gives fund managers the ability to track, prioritize, and even communicate with investors using the BHA platform. BHA also has incorporated functions that let clients do the following:
- Import contacts and export saved contacts from our platform via a CSV file.
- Save BHA investor contacts to a vCard on clients’ internal systems.
- Create tasks or a to-do list on BHA’s platform. Managing, organizing, and prioritizing investor contacts is a heavy workload. Clients can use BHA’s Web platform to maintain a detailed list of action items right on their computer screen.
- Create a pipeline of investor prospects with the ability to forecast, manage, and track each prospect’s status.
- Create instant status reports that cover usage of the system, report on contact with investors, and provide common sales reports.
Proprietary Technology
Brighton House is committed to helping clients find investors and investors source managers that fit investors' mandates. BHA has gone to great lengths to collect and compile a comprehensive database of alternative investors from around the world. Our team of 20 analysts works from a database that contains 35,000 investors across 15 categories. BHA estimates the database contains 85 percent of the world's alternative investors. BHA analysts use the 35,000 record database to produce updated leads on a daily basis, making approximately 3,000 calls a week, which typically result in 125 or more new mandates.
By profiling investors on a daily basis, BHA gathers the most important information that investors require for their current alternative investment mandates. Some of the data points that analysts discuss with investors are current strategy interest, sector interest, liquidity requirements, and targeted geographic exposure as well as manager track record and asset size. All of these investment parameters have been made searchable on the BHA platform. Additionally, client managers can search investors by their asset size and category (endowments, family offices, foundations, and so on) as well as by location (city, state, and country).
Fund managers can easily target any number of the 15 categories of investors BHA covers to discover which investors are currently searching for funds and the types in which they are interested. BHA provides a platform that enables sales/marketing professionals at alternative investment funds to increase their investor exposure in any designated region, country, or investor category.
The overall objective of BHA's research is to streamline the entire search process for both managers and investors. Therefore, BHA's platform lets managers select various data points (strategy, location, sector interest, and so on) and instantaneously find investors that match the search queries. At the same time, BHA's service enables investors to quickly source managers that match investors' investment mandates.
Fund managers that use our database to search for investors fall under the following categories.
- Hedge Funds
- Funds of Hedge Funds
- Private Equity Funds (including Venture Capital)
- Funds of Private Equity Funds
- Real Estate Funds
- Funds of Real Estate Funds
BHA's objective was to create a marketing platform that gave clients the tools and functionality that would create immediate results for their marketing campaigns. BHA realized that the most valuable aspect in marketing was the initial searching and qualifying of investors. Therefore, BHA created a filtering technology that automatically screens, filters, and vets investors on a live database of active mandates. One powerful tool on the BHA platform lets clients input up to 18 characteristics of their fund (such as strategy, sector, geographical focus, and so on). After the profile is created, it is immediately matched to active investor mandates on BHA's system. Clients' home pages are instantly populated with detailed profiles of investors with mandates that match clients' funds' strategies. The profiles include when analysts spoke to them, their contact details, and what type of fund they are seeking.
In addition, BHA's clients can proactively search the mandate database. Managers can create filters that sort investors using 15 parameters. For example:
- Strategy the investor is seeking (such as long/short equity, buyout fund, or real estate)
- Investor category (such as family offices, endowments, foundations, or consultants)
- Investors' geographical focus (such as North America, European, or Asia)
- Sector the investor is seeking (such as financials, healthcare, or technology)
- Asset size (such as investors with more than $100 million, less than $100 million, or more than $1 billion)
After the filters are established, the results are refreshed daily as new investor mandates are added to the system. If a particular investor mandate fits a fund's criteria, the filter automatically catches that profile. The system then notifies the manager and the result is displayed on its home page or dashboard. Another important aspect to the filtering system is the pipeline. Investor mandates are refreshed and updated on a daily basis by the BHA analyst team. New investor mandates are constantly being added to managers' filtering box on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. This automatically creates a pipeline of qualified investors for fund managers.
BHA has built a system that does the time-intensive and laborious job of identifying, targeting, and qualifying investors. Instead of taking weeks or months to find qualified investors, BHA has given fund managers a platform that increases their marketing efficiencies by providing them instant access to qualified investor prospects.